About This Blog

I was born and baptized and confirmed as a Lutheran. When I was in my twenties I read some of Luther’s works, and although his theological works were well written, seemingly well thought out, what was puzzling was how Luther would interrupt the flow of thought every few pages to call the pope bad names, sometimes vulgar names. Which leads to the question, What would Christianity be like if Christ cursed Caiaphas from the cross? Which leads to the next question, what subtle, or not so subtle, errors lie in theology interrupted by cursing? There have been devout Lutherans pastors preaching for five hundred years now, am I the first to ask these questions?

My wife was Baptist, and to encourage her to attend church we attended a moderate Baptist Church for many years. I did not believe that my baptism was invalid, that adult believer baptism was necessary for salvation, so I did not fully walk the aisle. Quite often I heard the opinion that Catholics were damned unless they accepted Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior, which meant they were lost unless they converted and walked the aisle. They included the Pope in this judgment, although I would think the Pope in the course of his baptism and confirmations and multiple ordinations would have sometime chosen Jesus as his Savior, implicitly if not explicitly.

I got the impression that choosing to accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior preferably should be emotional rather than an intellectual decision. Driving down the road really busy and distracted, not praying much, losing control and spinning on a rainy day, and throwing up your hands and singing, Jesus, Take the Wheel, that is just a perfect conversion, but reading a book, particularly a book written long ago by someone who never saw a television program, that is not so good a conversion, unless that book is a KJV Bible, that is better.

Based on my background, I am not particularly fond of polemics. If want to read a blog that champions Catholicism or Orthodoxy or Lutheranism or Baptist or whatever denomination they belong to, denigrating all the other denominations, doubting their salvation, there are thousands of such circle-the-wagon religious websites out there. THIS BLOG seeks to learn the history and doctrine of the early, medieval, and modern church, to learn that indeed there was much interesting history between Acts and the Protestant Reformation.

When anyone says they are going to convert from one denomination to another, sometimes they will know quite a bit about the denomination they plan to convert to, and the bad things their new faith community says about denomination they are converting from, but rarely do they know a great deal about their current faith community. Quite often if they do the work to truly learn about their current faith community they decide to stay put.

What is my religious affiliation? I was baptized Lutheran. Currently I do regularly attend church, I am a member of a faith community. Currently I am a seeker.

— Max Russ

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I was born and baptized and confirmed as a Lutheran. I made the mistake of reading works written by Luther, he has a bad habit of writing seemingly brilliant theology, but then every few pages he stops and calls the Pope often very vulgar names, what sort of Christian does that?
Currently I am a seeker, studying church history and the writings of the Church Fathers. I am involved in the Catholic divorce ministries in our diocese, and have finished the diocese two-year Catholic Lay Ministry program. Also I took a year of Orthodox off-campus seminary courses.
This blog explores the beauty of the Early Church and the writings and history of the Church through the centuries. I am a member of a faith community, for as St Augustine notes in his Confessions, you cannot truly be a Christian unless you worship God in the walls of the Church, unless persecution prevents this. This blog is non-polemical, so I really would rather not reveal my denomination here.

Book Reviews

Early Christian Writings were not written by the Apostles as were the books of the New Testament, but were written by leading Christians of the next generation who may have known some of the surviving apostles. These included epistles, some of them written to the same Christian communities St Paul has addressed a generation previously. Many of these epistles are written in the style of the Pauline epistles, sometimes using liturgical forms, sometimes weaving in and out of a prayer on behalf of communities they were addressing. […]

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To be Greek is to read Homer. The great epic poems of the Iliad and the Odyssey were known to all Greeks, these epic poems would be read for several days at the annual religious festivals. These Homeric epics had a far greater influence on the ancient Greek tongue than even the Bible and Shakespeare influence on the English language. […]

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This 38-volume library of the works of the Early Church Fathers in the first few centuries of the Church is an invaluable resource for the serious student of Theology, and the Scriptures also, since many of the writings of the early Church Fathers are Biblical commentaries. Although this collection was […]

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Professor Elizabeth Vandiver is an excellent guide through the world of the Homeric Epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. She is a captivating lecturer, she weighs in on the scholarly debates on these epics, she brings the ancient Greeks to life, her enthusiasm for the Ancient Greek culture is contagious. The Iliad and the Odyssey were engaging character studies, and Professor Vandiver brings out the conflicts and interactions between the various characters in these epics, and discusses what they tell us about the ancient Greeks. […]

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Readers looking neither for sublime language nor complex theories but for wisdom have long known that that Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus are worth reading. Those fortunate enough to encounter them either in their schooling or on library shelves have heard these ancient moralists speak with remarkable freshness and force to the basic issues of human character with which we all must struggle. For such readers, the popular philosophers of the Greco-Roman world deserve their self-designation as doctors of the soul. Precisely because they focus so precisely on everyday life, the character of the individual and the health of the family their ideas are as fresh today as they were millennia before. They analyze the passions of fear and desire, of envy and rage with brilliant insight. They precisely delineate the virtues and vices. They understand the process of moral development and the necessity of moral education. […]

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Tales of the Northwest is the most remarkable collection of Indian stories I have encountered. The romantic adventures among the Iroquois Indians in James Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, including Last of the Mohicans and Deerslayer, have their moments, but Tales of the Northwest surpass them in their vivid realism. Even when compared to the reminiscences of Lame Deer and Black Elk the Tales of the Northwest are superior. […]

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